“... up the family, taking first the father and the son, then the mother, daughter and baby, into the woods, where gunshots ring out. Last to be taken is the grandmother, who pleads for her life. ‘I know you’re a good man,’ she tells the Misfit. ‘You don’t look a bit like you have common blood.’ The Misfit – one of O’Connor’s deranged ...”

“... who lived down the road was shot in his bed and one of my 14-year-olds was killed in the woods. Julietta, his mother, cannot stop crying, her daughters cannot console her and she points to her youngest sons: ‘What use are they?’ The family had only just begun to get over the loss of the father, who was killed in a massacre in 1998. The house is a ...”

“... watershed: the Nixon administration’s decision, announced in 1971, to withdraw from the Bretton Woods agreement that had tied the dollar to gold and other currencies to the dollar. Nixon permitted the dollar to float in the currency markets, which eventually turned swift and treacherous. If the economy looked weak, the statecraft proved worse. The ...”

“... had been applied to vulgar clay’. Two years earlier, W.B. Yeats had published In the Seven Woods, which was full of references to fashions changing and a woman ageing; it had ‘Adam’s Curse’ as its centrepiece, in which the ‘beautiful mild woman’, on hearing the poet outline the difficulty of creating verse, Replied, ‘To be born woman is to ...”

“... the purchase by a brutish poacher called Dewey Floyd who works as a yard hand and lives in the woods. Floyd tells Webster he did it because he was drunk: ‘You see, I was mighty close to them dawgs, an’ that li’l one were my fav’rit. Sadie were a real stylish dawg. I jes don’t know rightly what it was, how I could come to doin it. But I sure’n ...”

“... my wristwatch and cigarette case – all of which I had given him’.Channon was warned by John Gielgud that his liaison with Rattigan was all too public, while Nigel Birch, a clever, sarcastic Tory MP, teased him about the silk shirt he wore with the embroidered initials ‘TR’. Channon was acquainted with Lord Berners and ‘his crazier ...”

“... bottles and baby clothes, the other with German dictionaries. When the family emerged from the woods, they were in Austria. The couple wanted to stay there, hoping to return to Hungary once the political situation had calmed down, but instead they ended up in Valangin, a tiny Swiss village in the canton of Neuchâtel. Settling there wasn’t a ...”

“... for the next attempt to regenerate national pride. The early omens weren’t good. Weight picks up John O’Farrell’s story about her election as Conservative Party leader in 1976, when she appeared in front of the cameras and gave a ‘V’ for victory sign the wrong way round. ‘She was smiling and telling the British people to fuck off at the same ...”

“... or rather J.J. Beegan did. When I turned to the Irish census records I could quite easily find John Beegan, who was born in 1868, the eldest child of John and Jane Beegan. In 1901 they were living together with the younger Beegans, Mary and Thomas, at 23 Dunlo Hill in Ballinasloe. On the census form, ...”

“... with him his teenage son plus a bottle of wine, hoping that Sue would take the young man into the woods and initiate him into the arts of love. None of them had any doubt that this was a woman of the world whereas Sue was actually quite shy and couldn’t see that she had given them any cause to think otherwise. She hadn’t; she just looked like a Scarlet ...”

“... famous educational experiments in history. Itard had taken into his care a young boy found in the woods of the Aveyron. The boy had been without human contact for so long that he seemed almost an animal. Itard named him Victor and invented many exercises with the aim of turning him into an educated French child, although he ultimately conceded defeat and took ...”

“... marriageable age in the whole first generation of the Plymouth Colony’, and the ship’s cooper, John Alden, whom she chose over the colony’s military supremo, Commander Myles Standish – an episode that became the subject of a poem by Longfellow. The maternal line included heroes of the War of Independence and cousins who fought on opposing sides in the ...”

“... his eye could reach Fair structures, rain bow-hued, arose; And rich pavilions thro’ the opening woods Gleamed from their waving curtains sunny gold; And winding thro’ the verdant vale Flowed streams of liquid light; And fluted cypresses reared up Their living obelisks Such enchanted topographies are further glimpses of the Susquehannah life that never ...”

“... sketches of her personal past, and historical events such as the Shoah, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the perpetual alert of B-52s in the American prairie, or the Kyoto Accords. Still, her most shocking alteration of former habits occurred in Swarm (2000), in which her sentences disintegrated utterly. Her chief thematic preoccupation in Swarm is ...”

“... work of an obscure photographer she had discovered in Paris (Atget), Ralph Steiner, Paul Grotz, John Cheever, Ben Shahn and, most important of all, Lincoln Kirstein.Evans always acknowledged the role luck played in his life, and nothing could have been luckier than the friendship he formed with Kirstein, whose influence on his career was so profound that ...”